Tag Archives: video

I know we’ve been quiet on the blog, all four agile admins have been busy – several of us moved to new jobs, everyone has a lot going on.

But we’re still doing stuff! I just went out to Carpenteria to film a LinkedIn Learning course on Incident Management. The agile admins have a full DevOps curriculum on LinkedIn Learning (which was lynda.com); most of them are in the “Become a DevOps Engineer” learning path! You can view them as a LIL member or they can be bought individually nowadays too.

We’ve done the 101 level (DevOps Foundation), the 201 level (CI/CD, CM/Infrastructure as Code, SRE, Monitoring and Observability, Lean and Agile) and now we’re hitting more details – Karthik’s done a bunch of Kubernetes and Cloud Native courses, Peco is doing more monitoring courses, James is doing DevSecOps courses…

And I just went and filmed an Incident Management course. Incident Response, really, I’m hoping for a subsequent course that focuses on retrospectives (each class is only like an hour long and retros are a huge fun topic so I wanted to give them enough time on their own).

Pictured are my producers Adam and Lori and my live action director Julia (who’s also done some of my other courses!) This was a slides course (my first), but they have a program where they can add in a little live action, and since I’ve done it a bunch and Julia’s great we burned through a bunch of scripts in a short time on camera! Thanks to all of them (and my content manager Brian Anderson, not pictured).

The Course

I’ve been creating IM processes and training and leading organizations in them for a while now. A good incident response program removes friction and lets your smart technical staff focus on one thing, solving the problem, without having to worry about what to do otherwise. When I left AlienVault, the #1 thing people came and said to me in my 2 week notice period was “Hey, that incident management process, that’s really made a huge difference,” which is great to hear.

Special thanks to J. Paul for giving me guidance on the course content and giving me permission to use his and Kevina Finn-Braun’s Incident Lifecycle Model in it.

Expect video topics like:

Why Do I Need Incident Management?

The Incident Command System

Scoping the Problem

Your Incident Toolchain

Incident Toolchain Example

Detecting and Reporting Incidents

First Response and Escalation

Incident Communication With Your Users

Communicating Inside Your Organization

Best Practices for Diagnosis and Repair

Cleaning Up After

Continuously Improving

Training and Game Days

Implementation Challenges

Oh, and I got to use props for the first time (like that fire extinguisher in the lead pic), we threw some in for kicks. Fun!

The Experience

Speaking of that, I just wanted to give the LinkedIn Learning team a shout-out. Making courses with them is a great experience, class all the way. They are all super skilled at what they do and super friendly. Going to their campus/studio in Carpenteria, CA is always an exceedingly pleasant experience. Everything’s top notch, sound booths, live action studios… It’s not the average webcam tech course when you’re looking down the barrel of a camera with a director, a producer, and a sound/teleprompter person fussing over the fine details! If you are an expert in something (not just tech) and are interested in doing courses, I’m happy to introduce you to someone there; it’s all top quality.

And they treat their people well there! As best as I can tell they always have, from when they were Lynda to when they were LinkedIn to now being owned by Microsoft. Lori confided in me, “I was a documentary filmmaker with a non-profit for years and I didn’t know jobs like this existed; I’ve never been treated so well.”

While I was there they were doing their monthly “InDay”, and apparently this is the most anticipated one of a year as it’s game themed. They had inflatable human foozball, arcade games, did up the cafeteria with a Stranger Things theme, even had a D&D training session.

And of course Carpinteria is beautiful, right on the beach, extremely temperate. It’s between Ventura and Santa Barbara, just north of LA. If you go out there, my hot tips are the nearby Shoals restaurant (a little down the 101) where you can get a table right on the water, and Chocolats du CaliBressan, a French chocolatier down in the far north end the beach side of Carpinteria. Oh and the booze is super cheap in the supermarket, so we always make some gin and juice and hang out in the Holiday Inn’s hot tub while we’re there…

Well we haven’t had a lot of spare blogging time but we’ve been busy – the agile admins have been hard at work on some more LinkedIn Learning/lynda.com video courses to help make DevOps more accessible for the common man and woman.

Monitoring is a big part of SRE, but too much to do in the scope of all one course – so at the same time, Peco and I filmed a companion course, DevOps Foundations: Monitoring and Observability! Like the CD and IaC courses, this alternates theory with demos.

Along with the recent DevOps Foundations: Lean and Agile I did with Karthik, we feel like we’ve now completed a curriculum that can introduce you to all the major areas of DevOps and prepare you to grow from there. (Link to lynda.com playlist.) The guys are doing other courses with lynda as well, we’ve kinda gotten addicted to doing them! You can check them all out by your favorite Agile Admin:

I love talking to the folks I meet at conferences and whatnot who have done the courses; let us know what other areas you’d like to get the Agile Admin learning treatment!

We’re not a consultancy or anything – just four practitioners here in Austin who love giving back to the community when we’re not doing our day jobs. We get some royalties per click from the classes, but other than that we don’t have anything to sell you. We got into this to help people make sense of the confusing DevOps landscape and we’ll keep doing it as long as it seems like it’s meeting that goal, so your feedback is needed to let us know if we should keep going and if so on what.

We’re really excited to announce that James Wickett and I (Ernest Mueller) from The Agile Admin have put together a comprehensive DevOps Fundamentals course for lynda.com – a 3 hour long course covering everything from DevOps’ Agile and Lean roots, to DevOps culture to book recommendations and we even cover future .

As you know we here at The Agile Admin have spent a lot of time trying to help people learn DevOps – for a variety of reasons, many of the original DevOps practitioners were reluctant to even define the term, and were against a lot of the “DevOps” training/certification programs that sprung up because they weren’t really a good reflection of the real scope of the movement. While we understand those factors and agree with some of the specific critiques, we think it’s frankly been criminally difficult to learn DevOps with the available resources to date (best answer: go to a variety of events, crawl some random blogs and twitters, try to piece it together yourself over time, read some kinda-related books…). The unicorns don’t need any more than that, but all four of the Agile Admins have worked in corporate IT before and have a lot of sympathy for all the folks out there that *don’t* work for Etsy or Netflix and are trying to figure out how this new world can make their work and life better.

In the course, we go into what we consider to be the three primary practice areas of DevOps – continuous delivery, infrastructure automation, and reliability engineering. lynda has a free trial period so feel free and go give it a look to see if it could help you!

To give you an idea of what is included in the course, here’s the course outline. Even in a three hour class there’s no way to comprehensively cover these topics, so we tried to extensively point you out at other resources as we go and have a whole section on great DevOps learning resources.

We worked long and hard on the course and we think it represents all the must-know aspects of DevOps and can get you started down the path of implementation with a good foundation. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Our good friend Damon Edwards from dev2ops came by our Austin office and recorded a video of Peco and I explaining how we do what we do! Peco never blogs, so this is a rare opportunity to hear him talk about these topics, and he’s full of great sound bytes. 🙂